Gourt > Arts > Literature > Myths and Folktales (77)
Folklore is the body of verbal expressive culture, including tales, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs current among a particular population, comprising the oral tradition of that culture, subculture, or group. The academic and usually ethnographic study of folklore is known as folkloristics.
History
The concept of folklore developed as part of the 19th century ideology of romantic nationalism, leading to the reshaping of oral traditions to serve modern ideological goals; only in the 20th century did ethnographers begin to attempt to record folklore without overt political goals. The Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm, collected orally transmitted German tales and published the first series as Kinder- und Hausmärchen ("Children's and Household Tales") in 1812.
The term was coined in 1846 by an Englishman, William Thoms, who wanted to use an Anglo-Saxon term for what was then called "popular antiquities." Johann Gottfried von Herder first advocated the deliberate recording and preservation of folklore to document the authentic spirit, tradition, and identity of the German people; the belief that there can be such authenticity is one of the tenets of the romantic nationalism which Herder developed. The definition most widely accepted by current scholars of the field is "artistic communication in small groups," coined by Dan Ben-Amos a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and the term, and the associated field of study, now include non-verbal art forms and customary practices.
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Myths and Folktales :: Literature
L.A. Times - Books & Talks
'The Second Plane' by Martin Amis
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700
September 11: Terror and Boredom IT would be too easy to read Martin Amis' slim book on Sept. 11 in a day and to dismiss it with a politically correct glare. The dozen essays, columns and reviews and two short stories in "The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom" are more illuminating than that, though deeply, sometimes self-indulgently flawed.
'The House of Widows' by Askold Melnyczuk
Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Family secrets lie at the end of a dark and twisted path FROM its puzzling opening line ("The most common grammatical error is the lie"), there's an ominous vibe to Askold Melnyczuk's third novel, "The House of Widows," and the sense of unease lingers until the final sentence. It's a mysterious, masterfully taut story in which dread plays a prominent role.
'Marco Polo' by Laurence Bergreen
Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0700
An account of the adventures of the celebrated 13th century world traveler. MARCO POLO was only 17 when he departed for China in 1271 with his father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo. Those two merchants of Venice were known to the boy primarily as storytellers of their fabulous exploits, writes award-winning biographer and historian Laurence Bergreen, for they had been absent more than 16 years, Marco's entire childhood. The pair had followed trade routes east, encountered exotic countries and customs and survived many perils; they had even lived for a time at the court of Kublai Khan, the leader of the Mongol Empire. Eventually they agreed to accompany his emissary west to the pope, vowing to return to Cambulac (Beijing) with several items the Great Khan had requested.
NYT > Books
Wasted Land
By WALTER KIRN Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:14:17 -0000
Nick Reding’s unnerving portrait of Oelwein, Iowa, depicts a catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions, precipitated by the loss of jobs and the rise of methamphetamines.
Unreal Estate
By TOM VANDERBILT Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:45:16 -0000
In “Busted,” The Times’s Edmund L. Andrews explains why he bought a house he couldn’t afford. In “Our Lot,” Alyssa Katz chronicles how home lending was upended in the first place.
Past-Prime Crisis
By CAITLIN MACY Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:43:39 -0000
In this novel, a septuagenarian East Village couple wrestle with real estate, terrorism, real estate, an ailing dog and real estate.
Fiction & Poetry
Lorrie Moore: "Childcare"
Lorrie Moore Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0000
The cold came late that fall, and the songbirds were caught off guard. By the time the snow and wind began in earnest, too many had been suckered into staying, and instead of flying south, instead of already having flown south, they were huddled in people’s yards, their feathers puffed . . .
Jorge Luis Borges: "A Dream"
Jorge Luis Borges Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0000
In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like . . .
Carol Muske-Dukes: "Twin Cities"
Carol Muske-Dukes Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0000
It was the river that made them two-- The mills on one side, The cathedral on the other. We watched its swift currents: If we stared long enough, maybe It would stop cold and let us Skate across to the other side. It never froze in place--though I once . . .
London Review of Books
The Irresistible Illusion · Rory Stewart: Why Are We in Afghanistan?
Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can - and perhaps will - be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.
Communiste et Rastignac · Christopher Caldwell: Bernard Kouchner
It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist and self-described 'mercenary of emergency medicine', he helped launch Médecins sans frontières in the early 1970s. He broadcast the plight of the Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s, advised Mitterrand in the 1980s, roused public indignation over events in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and served as interim governor of Kosovo after Nato's attack on Serbia . . . Kouchner may not have invented the concept of 'humanitarian intervention', but he has been its symbol for decades.
Diary · Clancy Martin: My Life as a Drunk
On 1 January this year, at about 11 o'clock in the evening, my wife found me, feet kicking, dangling from an improvised rope - a twisted yellow sheet - about a metre off the ground in our bedroom closet. Our two-year-old daughter was in the bed, sleeping, just a few feet away . . . I was at the end of a binge. I was also at the end of three years of secret drinking, of hiding bottles and sneaking away to bars while my wife thought I was living as I had promised her, as a sober man.
Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk
Cetaceous tales
Claire Armitstead, Pascal Wyse Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:17:46 -0000
Leviathan, the winner of this year's Samuel Johnson prize, is a monster of a book which takes in the history, lore and science of the whale. Philip Hoare tells how a lifelong fear of water played its part in his fascination with the world's biggest mammals. He recounts the story of the whale skeleton that inspired Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, which was recently dug up after lying for more than a century beneath the grounds of a Yorkshire stately home.He also explains why we shouldn't be too quick to condemn the Japanese for whaling, and reveals some surprising whale products that are still in use today.
The master's voice
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:01:00 -0000
John Updike's late stories are not his best, but they are a lesson in love. By Martin AmisThe following wedge of prose has two things wrong with it: one big thing and one little thing - one infelicity and one howler. Read it with attention. If you can spot both, then you have what is called a literary ear.... Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land.The minor flaw is the proximity of prior and prime. This gives us a dissonant rime riche on the first syllable; and the two words, besides, are etymological half-siblings, and should never be left alone together without many intercessionary chaperones. And the major flaw? The first sentence ends with the words "his land"; and so, with a resonant clunk, does the second. Mere quibbles, some may say. But we are addressing ourselves to John Updike, who was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov - who, in his turn, was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Joyce.So, the portrait of the artist as an old man: this is a murky and glutinous vista (and one of increasingly urgent interest to the present reviewer, who is closing in on 60). My broad impression is that writers, as they age, lose energy (inspiration, musicality, imagistic serendipity) but gain in craft (the knack of knowing what goes where). Medical science has granted us a new phenomenon: the octogenarian novel. And one thinks, with respect, of Saul Bellow's Ravelstein and Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest; yet no one would seriously compare these books to Humboldt's Gift and Harlot's Ghost. Updike was 76 when he died. And for many years he suffered from partial deafness. I don't know (perhaps nobody knows) whether the two afflictions are connected, but the fact is that Updike, in My Father's Tears and Other Stories, is in the process of losing his ear.This piece would have gone unwritten if its subject were still alive. In the last three decades I have published about 15,000 words of more or less unqualified praise of John Updike, and his achievement remains immortal. The most astonishing page in the new collection is the one headed "Books by John Updike": 62 volumes, many of them enormously long. His productivity was preternatural: it made you think of a berserk IVF pregnancy, or a physiological condition (pressure on the cortex?), or - more realistically, given his Depression-shadowed childhood - a Protestant work ethic taken to the point of outright fanaticism. My Father's Tears is Updike's last book, and perhaps his least distinguished. But it ends, all the same, with the glimmer, the thwarted promise, of a happier ending.Readers must now prepare themselves for quotation, and a blizzard of false quantities - by which I mean those rhymes and chimes and inadvertent repetitions, those toe-stubs, those excrescences and asperities that all writers hope to expunge from their work (or at least radically minimise: you never get them all). Updike's prose, that fantastic engine of euphony, of first-echelon perception, and of a wit both vicious and all-forgiving, has in this book lost its compass. Formerly, you used to reread Updike's sentences in a spirit of incredulous admiration. Here, too often, you reread them wondering a) what they mean, or b) why they're there, or c) how they survived composition, routine reappraisal, and proof-checking without causing a spasm of horrified self-correction.Consider:ants make mounds like coffee grounds ... polished bright by sliding anthracite ...my bride became allied in my mind ... except for her bust, abruptly outthrust ...This quatrain is not an example of Updike's light verse; the lines consist of four separate examples of wantonly careless prose. Similarly: "alone on a lonely afternoon", "Lee's way of getting away from her", " his rough-and-tumble, roughly equal matches with women", and "a soft round arm wrapped around her face". One sentence contains "walking" and "sidewalk"; another contains "knowing" and "knew"; another contains "year", "yearbook", and "year"."For what is more intimate even than sex but death?" Well, you know what he means (after a moment or two), but shouldn't that "but" be another "than" (which, I agree, wouldn't be any good either). "Fleischer had attained, in private, to licking her feet." Attained? And we surely don't need to be told that Fleischer isn't licking her feet in public. Or take this (from the title story) as an example of a sentence that audibly whimpers for a return to the drawing board: "He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realised, his hand warm in mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I." This isn't much of a realisation; and by the time you get to the repeated "than I", the one-letter first-person pronoun (which chimes with "realised" and "mine" and "tried" and "smile") is as hypnotically conspicuous as, say, "antidisestablishmentarianism". Let us end these painful quotes with what may be the most indolent period ever committed to paper by a major pen (and one so easy to fix: change the first "fall" to "autumn", or change the second "fall" to "drop"): "The grapes make a mess on the bricks in the fall; nobody ever thinks to pick them up when they fall." The most ridiculous thing about this sentence, somehow, is its stately semi-colon.Considered as mere narratives, the stories are as quietly inconclusive as Updike's stories usually are; but now, denuded of a vibrant verbal surface, they sometimes seem to be neither here nor there - products of nothing more than professional habit. Then, too, you notice a loss of organisational control and, in one case, a loss of any sense of propriety. This is "Varieties of Religious Experience", which concerns itself with September 11. First we get a strongish eyewitness account of the falling towers; then Mohammed Atta ordering his fourth scotch in a Floridan gogo bar; then an executive in the North Tower minutes after impact; then United 93 and the passengers' (weirdly telescoped) revolt. This story appeared in November 2002: fatally premature, and fatally unearned. Death, elsewhere appropriately seen as infinitely mysterious, august and royal - as "the distinguished thing", in Henry James's last words - is treated here without decorum and without taste. I said earlier that My Father's Tears contains the rumour of a happier ending. These stories are presented in chronological order, and after a while the reader feels a disquieting suspense. How far will the degeneration advance? Will the last few pages be unadorned gibberish? This doesn't happen; and the lost trust in the author begins to be partly restored. The prose takes on solidity and balance; Updike, here, is attempting less, and successfully evokes the "inner dwindling", the ever-narrower horizon imposed by time. This perhaps would have been Updike's very last phase. And the reader closes the book with a restive sadness that death has deprived us of it."The Full Glass", the final story, seems to me to be quietly innovative, like the ending of "The Walk with Elizanne" (where the literary imagination boldly rescues a failing memory). VS Pritchett, on his 90th birthday, said to me in an interview: "As one gets older one becomes very boring and long-winded to oneself. One's thoughts are long-winded, whereas before they were really rather nice and agitated. The story is a form of travel ... Travelling through minds and situations which reveal their strangeness to you. Old age kills travel."I suggest without irony that Updike's last challenge might have been to turn long-windedness into art - and to make boredom interesting.Age waters the writer down. The most terrible fate of all is to lose the ability to impart life to your creations (your creations, in other words, are dead on arrival). Other novelists simply fall out of love with the reader; this was true of James, and also of Joyce (who never much cared for the reader in the first place: what he cared for was words). Not so with Updike, even in these loose and straitened pages. As you might see on a signpost in his beloved American countryside (while approaching some stoical little township), the stories here are "Thickly Settled". Updike's creations live, and authorial love is what sustains them. He put it very plainly in his memoir, Self-Consciousness: "Imitation is praise. Description expresses love." That love, at least, never began to weaken.• Martin Amis's novel The Pregnant Widow will be published by Cape next year. To order My Father's Tears and Other Stories for £17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846.John UpdikeFictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
All quiet on the God front
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:01:00 -0000
Simon Blackburn discusses the argument that religious experience can't be discussedThis is an eloquent and interesting book, although you do not quite get what it says on the tin. Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a history of religious practice in many different cultures, arguing that in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same thing. They use devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music. These are similarly difficult to create, and even to appreciate. But nobody who has managed either would doubt that something valuable has happened in the process. We come out of the art gallery or concert hall enriched and braced, elevated and tranquil, and may even fancy ourselves better people, though the change may or may not be noticed by those around us.This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it once was in all the world's best traditions. However, there is a serpent in this paradise, as in others. Or rather, several serpents, but the worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can't you fail. This is Armstrong's principal target. With the scientific triumphs of the 17th century, religion stopped being a practice and started to become a theory - in particular the theory of the divine architect. This is a perversion of anything valuable in religious practice, Armstrong writes, and it is only this perverted view that arouses the scorn of modern "militant" atheists. So Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris have chosen a straw man as a target. Real religion is serenely immune to their discovery that it is silly to talk of a divine architect. So what should the religious adept actually say by way of expressing his or her faith? Nothing. This is the "apophatic" tradition, in which nothing about God can be put into words. Armstrong firmly recommends silence, having written at least 15 books on the topic. Words such as "God" have to be seen as symbols, not names, but any word falls short of describing what it symbolises, and will always be inadequate, contradictory, metaphorical or allegorical. The mystery at the heart of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language. Silence is its truest expression. The right kind of silence, of course, not that of the pothead or inebriate. The religious state is exactly that of Alice after hearing the nonsense poem "Jabberwocky": "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't exactly know what they are." If Alice puts on a dog collar, she will be at one with the tradition.Armstrong is not presenting a case for God in the sense most people in our idolatrous world would think of it. The ordinary man or woman in the pew or on the prayer mat probably thinks of God as a kind of large version of themselves with mysterious powers and a rather nasty temper. That is the vice of theory again, and as long as they think like that, ordinary folk are not truly religious, whatever they profess. By contrast, Armstrong promises that her kinds of practice will make us better, wiser, more forgiving, loving, courageous, selfless, hopeful and just. Who can be against that? The odd thing is that the book presupposes that such desirable improvements are the same thing as an increase in understanding - only a kind of understanding that has no describable content. It is beyond words, yet is nevertheless to be described in terms of awareness and truth. But why should we accept that? Imagine that I come out of the art gallery or other trance with a beatific smile on my face. I have enjoyed myself, and feel better. Perhaps I give a coin to the beggar I ignored on the way in. Even if I do so, there is no reason to describe the improvement in terms of my having understood anything. If I feel more generous, well and good, but the proof of that pudding is not my beatific smile but how I behave. As Wittgenstein, whose views on religion Armstrong thoroughly endorses, also said, an inner process stands in need of outward criteria. You can feel good without being good, and be good without stretching your understanding beyond words. Her experience of "Jabberwocky" may have improved Alice. Silence is just that. It is a kind of lowest common denominator of the human mind. The machine is idling. Which direction it then goes after a period of idling is a highly unpredictable matter. As David Hume put it, in human nature there is "some particle of the dove, mixed in with the wolf and the serpent". So we can expect that some directions will be better and others worse. And that is what, alas, we always find, with or without the song and dance.• Simon Blackburn's Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed is published by Penguin. Philosophyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
NPR Topics: Books
An Enchanting Tour Through A World Of Idioms
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:39:00 -0400
Author Jag Bhalla catalogs the unique turns of phrase that different cultures use in his new book I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears.
Chat While Reading: The Future Of Books?
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:52:00 -0400
BookGlutton.com, a new interactive site, allows readers to chat while reading. Could this mark the beginning of a change in how we read books?
Red, White And True: The Great American Biography
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:51:00 -0400
Country legend Johnny Cash, bon vivant George Plimpton and consummate entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. don't have much in common. But their lives have much to tell us about what it means to be a great American.
Slashdot: Book Reviews
The Twitter Book
samzenpus Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:15:00 -0000
stoolpigeon writes "Microblogging service Twitter has undeniably been a hit, with growth rates that were at times in excess of 1400%. The growth was rapid enough that the site became well known for its periodic, and, at times, extensive downtime. Even with these issues, the service continued to grow rapidly, and with celebrities getting into the mix Twitter was quickly on the radar of mainstream media. The ubiquity of Twitter and ever-increasing coverage of 'tweets' has also brought the inevitable backlash. As with anything that gains high-profile popularity, there are plenty of Twitter haters out there, though the role Twitter has played in the recent Iranian elections seems to have brought more legitimacy to Twitter in the eyes of many. With popularity come books, and quite a few are already out there about and for Twitter, but my favorite so far is The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein." Read below for the rest of JR's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Unlocking Android
samzenpus Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:26:00 -0000
Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the potential challengers to Apple's phenomenally popular iPhone, perhaps the one with the best prospects is Google's Android, which is not a mobile phone per se, but rather an open-source platform that the company encourages phone manufacturers to deploy in their own products. Similarly, Google encourages computer programmers to develop applications for the Android environment. But learning how to create such applications is daunting to the uninitiated, particularly for developers who have never before worked with the user interface controls, Web services, and other resources involved. A recently published book, Unlocking Android, is designed to help such developers." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux 2nd ed.
samzenpus Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:55:00 -0000
stoolpigeon writes "One thing I love about Linux is the rapid development and frequent updates that allow me to run the latest versions of all my favorite software packages. My favorite distributions make it simple to always have the latest and greatest. In fact, the distros themselves roll out new versions regularly, and I am always excited to see what new packages and features will be included. For book publishers this must be a little less exciting. Anything tied to a specific product that is under active development is going to quickly be behind the times. Mark Sobell's A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux managed to avoid the worst of this by providing a lot of information that is useful for any Linux user running any distro. But still things move forward and almost exactly a year later we have A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux 2nd ed. I was very pleased with the first edition and I think they've managed to really improve what was already a solid resource." Read below for the rest of JR's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Books
Classic review: 1776
[The Monitor occasionally reprints material from its archives. This review originally ran on May 24, 2005.] In December 1776 Thomas Paine reflected on the year past and wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls."
Truck: A Love Story
In Truck: A Love Story, Michael Perry chronicles a year during which he rebuilds an old pickup, becomes engaged (after many years of bachelorhood), and grows a garden. His prose style is very readable: not overly complex, but not simplistic either. He is both extremely funny and terribly insightful about ...
In the Kitchen
Restaurants are one of my favorite indulgences. (Cooking is fun. Dishes, less so. And my son is not quite tall enough to inflict with that chore.) As a result, I have stayed far, far away from Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” and any reality series starring Gordon Ramsay.
Subscribe to Literature RSS feed 
'The Second Plane' by Martin Amis
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700
September 11: Terror and Boredom IT would be too easy to read Martin Amis' slim book on Sept. 11 in a day and to dismiss it with a politically correct glare. The dozen essays, columns and reviews and two short stories in "The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom" are more illuminating than that, though deeply, sometimes self-indulgently flawed.
'The House of Widows' by Askold Melnyczuk
Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Family secrets lie at the end of a dark and twisted path FROM its puzzling opening line ("The most common grammatical error is the lie"), there's an ominous vibe to Askold Melnyczuk's third novel, "The House of Widows," and the sense of unease lingers until the final sentence. It's a mysterious, masterfully taut story in which dread plays a prominent role.
'Marco Polo' by Laurence Bergreen
Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0700
An account of the adventures of the celebrated 13th century world traveler. MARCO POLO was only 17 when he departed for China in 1271 with his father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo. Those two merchants of Venice were known to the boy primarily as storytellers of their fabulous exploits, writes award-winning biographer and historian Laurence Bergreen, for they had been absent more than 16 years, Marco's entire childhood. The pair had followed trade routes east, encountered exotic countries and customs and survived many perils; they had even lived for a time at the court of Kublai Khan, the leader of the Mongol Empire. Eventually they agreed to accompany his emissary west to the pope, vowing to return to Cambulac (Beijing) with several items the Great Khan had requested.
NYT > Books
Wasted Land
By WALTER KIRN Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:14:17 -0000
Nick Reding’s unnerving portrait of Oelwein, Iowa, depicts a catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions, precipitated by the loss of jobs and the rise of methamphetamines.
Unreal Estate
By TOM VANDERBILT Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:45:16 -0000
In “Busted,” The Times’s Edmund L. Andrews explains why he bought a house he couldn’t afford. In “Our Lot,” Alyssa Katz chronicles how home lending was upended in the first place.
Past-Prime Crisis
By CAITLIN MACY Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:43:39 -0000
In this novel, a septuagenarian East Village couple wrestle with real estate, terrorism, real estate, an ailing dog and real estate.
Fiction & Poetry
Lorrie Moore: "Childcare"
Lorrie Moore Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0000
The cold came late that fall, and the songbirds were caught off guard. By the time the snow and wind began in earnest, too many had been suckered into staying, and instead of flying south, instead of already having flown south, they were huddled in people’s yards, their feathers puffed . . .
Jorge Luis Borges: "A Dream"
Jorge Luis Borges Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0000
In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like . . .
Carol Muske-Dukes: "Twin Cities"
Carol Muske-Dukes Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0000
It was the river that made them two-- The mills on one side, The cathedral on the other. We watched its swift currents: If we stared long enough, maybe It would stop cold and let us Skate across to the other side. It never froze in place--though I once . . .
London Review of Books
The Irresistible Illusion · Rory Stewart: Why Are We in Afghanistan?
Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can - and perhaps will - be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.
Communiste et Rastignac · Christopher Caldwell: Bernard Kouchner
It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist and self-described 'mercenary of emergency medicine', he helped launch Médecins sans frontières in the early 1970s. He broadcast the plight of the Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s, advised Mitterrand in the 1980s, roused public indignation over events in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and served as interim governor of Kosovo after Nato's attack on Serbia . . . Kouchner may not have invented the concept of 'humanitarian intervention', but he has been its symbol for decades.
Diary · Clancy Martin: My Life as a Drunk
On 1 January this year, at about 11 o'clock in the evening, my wife found me, feet kicking, dangling from an improvised rope - a twisted yellow sheet - about a metre off the ground in our bedroom closet. Our two-year-old daughter was in the bed, sleeping, just a few feet away . . . I was at the end of a binge. I was also at the end of three years of secret drinking, of hiding bottles and sneaking away to bars while my wife thought I was living as I had promised her, as a sober man.
Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk
Cetaceous tales
Claire Armitstead, Pascal Wyse Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:17:46 -0000
Leviathan, the winner of this year's Samuel Johnson prize, is a monster of a book which takes in the history, lore and science of the whale. Philip Hoare tells how a lifelong fear of water played its part in his fascination with the world's biggest mammals. He recounts the story of the whale skeleton that inspired Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, which was recently dug up after lying for more than a century beneath the grounds of a Yorkshire stately home.He also explains why we shouldn't be too quick to condemn the Japanese for whaling, and reveals some surprising whale products that are still in use today.
The master's voice
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:01:00 -0000
John Updike's late stories are not his best, but they are a lesson in love. By Martin AmisThe following wedge of prose has two things wrong with it: one big thing and one little thing - one infelicity and one howler. Read it with attention. If you can spot both, then you have what is called a literary ear.... Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land.The minor flaw is the proximity of prior and prime. This gives us a dissonant rime riche on the first syllable; and the two words, besides, are etymological half-siblings, and should never be left alone together without many intercessionary chaperones. And the major flaw? The first sentence ends with the words "his land"; and so, with a resonant clunk, does the second. Mere quibbles, some may say. But we are addressing ourselves to John Updike, who was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov - who, in his turn, was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Joyce.So, the portrait of the artist as an old man: this is a murky and glutinous vista (and one of increasingly urgent interest to the present reviewer, who is closing in on 60). My broad impression is that writers, as they age, lose energy (inspiration, musicality, imagistic serendipity) but gain in craft (the knack of knowing what goes where). Medical science has granted us a new phenomenon: the octogenarian novel. And one thinks, with respect, of Saul Bellow's Ravelstein and Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest; yet no one would seriously compare these books to Humboldt's Gift and Harlot's Ghost. Updike was 76 when he died. And for many years he suffered from partial deafness. I don't know (perhaps nobody knows) whether the two afflictions are connected, but the fact is that Updike, in My Father's Tears and Other Stories, is in the process of losing his ear.This piece would have gone unwritten if its subject were still alive. In the last three decades I have published about 15,000 words of more or less unqualified praise of John Updike, and his achievement remains immortal. The most astonishing page in the new collection is the one headed "Books by John Updike": 62 volumes, many of them enormously long. His productivity was preternatural: it made you think of a berserk IVF pregnancy, or a physiological condition (pressure on the cortex?), or - more realistically, given his Depression-shadowed childhood - a Protestant work ethic taken to the point of outright fanaticism. My Father's Tears is Updike's last book, and perhaps his least distinguished. But it ends, all the same, with the glimmer, the thwarted promise, of a happier ending.Readers must now prepare themselves for quotation, and a blizzard of false quantities - by which I mean those rhymes and chimes and inadvertent repetitions, those toe-stubs, those excrescences and asperities that all writers hope to expunge from their work (or at least radically minimise: you never get them all). Updike's prose, that fantastic engine of euphony, of first-echelon perception, and of a wit both vicious and all-forgiving, has in this book lost its compass. Formerly, you used to reread Updike's sentences in a spirit of incredulous admiration. Here, too often, you reread them wondering a) what they mean, or b) why they're there, or c) how they survived composition, routine reappraisal, and proof-checking without causing a spasm of horrified self-correction.Consider:ants make mounds like coffee grounds ... polished bright by sliding anthracite ...my bride became allied in my mind ... except for her bust, abruptly outthrust ...This quatrain is not an example of Updike's light verse; the lines consist of four separate examples of wantonly careless prose. Similarly: "alone on a lonely afternoon", "Lee's way of getting away from her", " his rough-and-tumble, roughly equal matches with women", and "a soft round arm wrapped around her face". One sentence contains "walking" and "sidewalk"; another contains "knowing" and "knew"; another contains "year", "yearbook", and "year"."For what is more intimate even than sex but death?" Well, you know what he means (after a moment or two), but shouldn't that "but" be another "than" (which, I agree, wouldn't be any good either). "Fleischer had attained, in private, to licking her feet." Attained? And we surely don't need to be told that Fleischer isn't licking her feet in public. Or take this (from the title story) as an example of a sentence that audibly whimpers for a return to the drawing board: "He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realised, his hand warm in mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I." This isn't much of a realisation; and by the time you get to the repeated "than I", the one-letter first-person pronoun (which chimes with "realised" and "mine" and "tried" and "smile") is as hypnotically conspicuous as, say, "antidisestablishmentarianism". Let us end these painful quotes with what may be the most indolent period ever committed to paper by a major pen (and one so easy to fix: change the first "fall" to "autumn", or change the second "fall" to "drop"): "The grapes make a mess on the bricks in the fall; nobody ever thinks to pick them up when they fall." The most ridiculous thing about this sentence, somehow, is its stately semi-colon.Considered as mere narratives, the stories are as quietly inconclusive as Updike's stories usually are; but now, denuded of a vibrant verbal surface, they sometimes seem to be neither here nor there - products of nothing more than professional habit. Then, too, you notice a loss of organisational control and, in one case, a loss of any sense of propriety. This is "Varieties of Religious Experience", which concerns itself with September 11. First we get a strongish eyewitness account of the falling towers; then Mohammed Atta ordering his fourth scotch in a Floridan gogo bar; then an executive in the North Tower minutes after impact; then United 93 and the passengers' (weirdly telescoped) revolt. This story appeared in November 2002: fatally premature, and fatally unearned. Death, elsewhere appropriately seen as infinitely mysterious, august and royal - as "the distinguished thing", in Henry James's last words - is treated here without decorum and without taste. I said earlier that My Father's Tears contains the rumour of a happier ending. These stories are presented in chronological order, and after a while the reader feels a disquieting suspense. How far will the degeneration advance? Will the last few pages be unadorned gibberish? This doesn't happen; and the lost trust in the author begins to be partly restored. The prose takes on solidity and balance; Updike, here, is attempting less, and successfully evokes the "inner dwindling", the ever-narrower horizon imposed by time. This perhaps would have been Updike's very last phase. And the reader closes the book with a restive sadness that death has deprived us of it."The Full Glass", the final story, seems to me to be quietly innovative, like the ending of "The Walk with Elizanne" (where the literary imagination boldly rescues a failing memory). VS Pritchett, on his 90th birthday, said to me in an interview: "As one gets older one becomes very boring and long-winded to oneself. One's thoughts are long-winded, whereas before they were really rather nice and agitated. The story is a form of travel ... Travelling through minds and situations which reveal their strangeness to you. Old age kills travel."I suggest without irony that Updike's last challenge might have been to turn long-windedness into art - and to make boredom interesting.Age waters the writer down. The most terrible fate of all is to lose the ability to impart life to your creations (your creations, in other words, are dead on arrival). Other novelists simply fall out of love with the reader; this was true of James, and also of Joyce (who never much cared for the reader in the first place: what he cared for was words). Not so with Updike, even in these loose and straitened pages. As you might see on a signpost in his beloved American countryside (while approaching some stoical little township), the stories here are "Thickly Settled". Updike's creations live, and authorial love is what sustains them. He put it very plainly in his memoir, Self-Consciousness: "Imitation is praise. Description expresses love." That love, at least, never began to weaken.• Martin Amis's novel The Pregnant Widow will be published by Cape next year. To order My Father's Tears and Other Stories for £17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846.John UpdikeFictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
All quiet on the God front
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:01:00 -0000
Simon Blackburn discusses the argument that religious experience can't be discussedThis is an eloquent and interesting book, although you do not quite get what it says on the tin. Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a history of religious practice in many different cultures, arguing that in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same thing. They use devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music. These are similarly difficult to create, and even to appreciate. But nobody who has managed either would doubt that something valuable has happened in the process. We come out of the art gallery or concert hall enriched and braced, elevated and tranquil, and may even fancy ourselves better people, though the change may or may not be noticed by those around us.This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it once was in all the world's best traditions. However, there is a serpent in this paradise, as in others. Or rather, several serpents, but the worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can't you fail. This is Armstrong's principal target. With the scientific triumphs of the 17th century, religion stopped being a practice and started to become a theory - in particular the theory of the divine architect. This is a perversion of anything valuable in religious practice, Armstrong writes, and it is only this perverted view that arouses the scorn of modern "militant" atheists. So Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris have chosen a straw man as a target. Real religion is serenely immune to their discovery that it is silly to talk of a divine architect. So what should the religious adept actually say by way of expressing his or her faith? Nothing. This is the "apophatic" tradition, in which nothing about God can be put into words. Armstrong firmly recommends silence, having written at least 15 books on the topic. Words such as "God" have to be seen as symbols, not names, but any word falls short of describing what it symbolises, and will always be inadequate, contradictory, metaphorical or allegorical. The mystery at the heart of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language. Silence is its truest expression. The right kind of silence, of course, not that of the pothead or inebriate. The religious state is exactly that of Alice after hearing the nonsense poem "Jabberwocky": "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't exactly know what they are." If Alice puts on a dog collar, she will be at one with the tradition.Armstrong is not presenting a case for God in the sense most people in our idolatrous world would think of it. The ordinary man or woman in the pew or on the prayer mat probably thinks of God as a kind of large version of themselves with mysterious powers and a rather nasty temper. That is the vice of theory again, and as long as they think like that, ordinary folk are not truly religious, whatever they profess. By contrast, Armstrong promises that her kinds of practice will make us better, wiser, more forgiving, loving, courageous, selfless, hopeful and just. Who can be against that? The odd thing is that the book presupposes that such desirable improvements are the same thing as an increase in understanding - only a kind of understanding that has no describable content. It is beyond words, yet is nevertheless to be described in terms of awareness and truth. But why should we accept that? Imagine that I come out of the art gallery or other trance with a beatific smile on my face. I have enjoyed myself, and feel better. Perhaps I give a coin to the beggar I ignored on the way in. Even if I do so, there is no reason to describe the improvement in terms of my having understood anything. If I feel more generous, well and good, but the proof of that pudding is not my beatific smile but how I behave. As Wittgenstein, whose views on religion Armstrong thoroughly endorses, also said, an inner process stands in need of outward criteria. You can feel good without being good, and be good without stretching your understanding beyond words. Her experience of "Jabberwocky" may have improved Alice. Silence is just that. It is a kind of lowest common denominator of the human mind. The machine is idling. Which direction it then goes after a period of idling is a highly unpredictable matter. As David Hume put it, in human nature there is "some particle of the dove, mixed in with the wolf and the serpent". So we can expect that some directions will be better and others worse. And that is what, alas, we always find, with or without the song and dance.• Simon Blackburn's Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed is published by Penguin. Philosophyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
NPR Topics: Books
An Enchanting Tour Through A World Of Idioms
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:39:00 -0400
Author Jag Bhalla catalogs the unique turns of phrase that different cultures use in his new book I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears.
Chat While Reading: The Future Of Books?
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:52:00 -0400
BookGlutton.com, a new interactive site, allows readers to chat while reading. Could this mark the beginning of a change in how we read books?
Red, White And True: The Great American Biography
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:51:00 -0400
Country legend Johnny Cash, bon vivant George Plimpton and consummate entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. don't have much in common. But their lives have much to tell us about what it means to be a great American.
Slashdot: Book Reviews
The Twitter Book
samzenpus Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:15:00 -0000
stoolpigeon writes "Microblogging service Twitter has undeniably been a hit, with growth rates that were at times in excess of 1400%. The growth was rapid enough that the site became well known for its periodic, and, at times, extensive downtime. Even with these issues, the service continued to grow rapidly, and with celebrities getting into the mix Twitter was quickly on the radar of mainstream media. The ubiquity of Twitter and ever-increasing coverage of 'tweets' has also brought the inevitable backlash. As with anything that gains high-profile popularity, there are plenty of Twitter haters out there, though the role Twitter has played in the recent Iranian elections seems to have brought more legitimacy to Twitter in the eyes of many. With popularity come books, and quite a few are already out there about and for Twitter, but my favorite so far is The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein." Read below for the rest of JR's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Unlocking Android
samzenpus Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:26:00 -0000
Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the potential challengers to Apple's phenomenally popular iPhone, perhaps the one with the best prospects is Google's Android, which is not a mobile phone per se, but rather an open-source platform that the company encourages phone manufacturers to deploy in their own products. Similarly, Google encourages computer programmers to develop applications for the Android environment. But learning how to create such applications is daunting to the uninitiated, particularly for developers who have never before worked with the user interface controls, Web services, and other resources involved. A recently published book, Unlocking Android, is designed to help such developers." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux 2nd ed.
samzenpus Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:55:00 -0000
stoolpigeon writes "One thing I love about Linux is the rapid development and frequent updates that allow me to run the latest versions of all my favorite software packages. My favorite distributions make it simple to always have the latest and greatest. In fact, the distros themselves roll out new versions regularly, and I am always excited to see what new packages and features will be included. For book publishers this must be a little less exciting. Anything tied to a specific product that is under active development is going to quickly be behind the times. Mark Sobell's A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux managed to avoid the worst of this by providing a lot of information that is useful for any Linux user running any distro. But still things move forward and almost exactly a year later we have A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux 2nd ed. I was very pleased with the first edition and I think they've managed to really improve what was already a solid resource." Read below for the rest of JR's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Books
Classic review: 1776
[The Monitor occasionally reprints material from its archives. This review originally ran on May 24, 2005.] In December 1776 Thomas Paine reflected on the year past and wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls."
Truck: A Love Story
In Truck: A Love Story, Michael Perry chronicles a year during which he rebuilds an old pickup, becomes engaged (after many years of bachelorhood), and grows a garden. His prose style is very readable: not overly complex, but not simplistic either. He is both extremely funny and terribly insightful about ...
In the Kitchen
Restaurants are one of my favorite indulgences. (Cooking is fun. Dishes, less so. And my son is not quite tall enough to inflict with that chore.) As a result, I have stayed far, far away from Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” and any reality series starring Gordon Ramsay.
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